<div>Stew,</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks for starting this thread. This is important stuff:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2978/drupal-answers" target="_blank">http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2978/drupal-answers</a></div>
<div><br></div>I want to put my support behind this proposal and explain my thinking in doing so.<div><br></div><div>The Drupal community is already growing faster than Drupal's infrastructure can easily support. With the release of D7 and all the other associated projects getting off the ground, <a href="http://drupal.org" target="_blank">drupal.org</a> is increasingly often a bottleneck or blocker. We have wonderful hosts from OSUOSL, but the human resources needed to develop, maintain and manage our own infrastructure (which is a 24x7x365 job) are limited.</div>
<div><br></div><div>We have to pick our battles. I much would rather see energy, effort, attention and money poured into continuing to improve our git and module infrastructure — which is much more deeply intrinsic to the health and future of the project — and accept that even though we *can* build our own StackOverflow (@eaton proved this already) that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best use of limited resources, or the best thing for the project.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Drupal can theoretically/technically solve a lot of its own problems, but I think we often suffer from a "not built here" prejudice as a result. In the realm of getting good quality answers to Drupal questions out to the most people possible, I can't see how a StackExchange site would do anything but help. I would love to see the community embrace something really cool and useful from the wider Internet as a way to promote the project.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Finally, I should say that I *do not* think a StackExchange answers site replaces anything. It's not an issue queue, and it's not a replacement for the dialogue that exist in the forums. I would say it's a new resource, something that can help the 10s of 1000s of people who will be trying to wrap their mind around Drupal in the coming year. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Cheers</div><div>-josh</div>